It's the end of the world as you know it – brought to you by a Gnome Mage with big balls of fire

I wasn’t expecting 3.3.3

Don’t ask me what I was expecting, or when I was expecting 3.3, but I just wasn’t expecting it this morning.

I was expecting to log on at 5.55 and take a shot at the chest in Gurubashi Arena, but the servers weren’t up.

Then they were, so I logged in, chest was there, I jumped on it, I was 90% of the way through opening it and…

The servers weren’t there… well I DC’d anyway.

After about 10 attempts to log on, where the arena would appear but either I or the chest wouldn’t, I finally appeared.

Dead.. a ghost in the graveyard.

Ohh well… PvP happens, even if I am not there at the time.

Changes

A quick rez and a port later I was back in Dalaran.

As usual the 1st stop was for fan mail.

Nope, no fan mail, just some rubbish about Emblem vendors having their annual convention in Dalaran… talk about dumbing down the game. As if it wasn’t easy enough to earn the Emblems, now you don’t even have to quest to find their vendors.

Someone stole my Daily Battleground Quest

I know it was a pain when you would get the Oculus of battlegrounds (we all have at least one), but I did like knowing what trouble I was going to get into before signing up.. do I take a mate, 9 mates, lose on my own…

Now it’s down to the luck of the gods.

At least the standard battleground interface is still there, random fun is one thing, planned assassination is another!

What to do with all those marks?

My next concern was my marks.

This is what knocked me about 3.3 arriving today… I didn’t expect it and I wanted to hand them in for the greater honor of Concerted efforts rather than Commendations

185 honor isn’t bad for handing in just one battleground mark. I dare say I am not the only one with a mailbox overflowing with Alterac Valley marks (Which makes me wonder why the commendations only stack in 10’s?)

However the old system, which works out at 248 honor per mark (assuming you have the 6 to hand in) is much sweeter.

The good news

The good news is that the Concerted Efforts option still remains (well it did when the server came up, it better when I get home tonight).

The requirements are the same, so all is still good in the world.

WTB T10, haz MarksOfHonor

So I guess now I just need to find something to spend the honor on. I dare say that like people that enjoy random heroics, there comes a time when you look at the overflowing pile of tokens and just wonder why…

Don’t get me wrong, I love my Battlegrounds and my Arena team has formed, if not fought (we got a little carried away in the BGs), but there are only so many gems I want to buy… I don’t PvP to drive my AH business, but I do PvP too much and can’t afford any of the Frost Emblem items… NOT EVEN THE PVP GEAR that I can’t buy with HONOR (serious suck that!)

Ahhh well… looks like a hour of enduring the Chooo Chooo! sound as I hand in my BG marks is coming.

I just blow my extra honor on red gems, brought 10 in the last 2-3 weeks. But before shutdown I did know enough to hand in 8 Concerted efforts which reduced my IoC to zero and meant i could clean out 8 more av marks from my mail.

I’m actually very pleased with the new random BG system and the extra honor. It’s only recently that I’ve jumped on the PvP BG bandwagon and I’m pleased with the extra honor since well…I have tons of PvP gear to buy. I still think it’s extremely hard to get decent PvE gear though, because well if you’re not raiding you only get 2 Emblems of Frost a day. Which sucks beyond belief. You can buy PvP gear for Emblems, why can’t you buy decent PvE gear for honor points? Puzzling.

Took me a while to figure out what to do with my marks of honor though. The crowded mess in Halls of Legends in Ogrimmar showed me the way to go (they were all gathering for the vendor dude to trade their marks of honor).